About me

I’m a software engineering leader/researcher passionate about building AI-driven systems and advancing software systems. I hold a PhD, see my publications.

Currently, I lead projects at Blue.Cloud’s GenAI Department, where I guide AI-driven modernization initiatives, helping enterprises in healthcare, banking, and insurance adopt large language models and advanced AI systems. On the open-source side, I’m the founder of gen-atomic, a library for experiment tracking and auto-prompting to streamline evaluation of LLM-based code generation. I also teach an Agentic AI lecture at Istanbul Technical University, where I share practical design patterns and real-world insights from industry with senior students.

Previously, I was the Director of Software Development at Hostamedia, where I led the development of large-scale ML-powered products, including enterprise search and information retrieval systems adopted by leading e-commerce companies. Alongside industry work, I spent over a decade as a lecturer, delivering 75+ courses on test-driven development, design patterns, and enterprise architectures to thousands of developers.

Check out my other profiles for further details:
Linkedin | Twitter | Medium | Google Scholar | GitHub

I’m always open to collaborating on open-source or experimental projects — feel free to reach out if you’d like to join.

Here are what I'm reading these days. Feel free to buy me a book from the list here ;)



Gokhan Ercan
Istanbul / TURKEY

Gökhan Ercan See it on X
The best programmers today will be the next generation of product managers.

Companies should stop this non-technical “Product Owner + Scrum Master” nonsense and start empowering their strongest engineers to own, prioritize, and deliver the backlog.
t.co/qGDM3zBUaQ
Oct 3, 2026
Gökhan Ercan See it on X
A pleasure to teach Agentic AI this term at Istanbul Technical University.

We covered 17 agentic patterns: Agentic RAG, ReAct, Memory, Guardrails, multi-agent, Graph-of-Thoughts. Best part: seeing 40 student projects move from "use an LLM" to "design an agent."
Jun 25, 2026
Gökhan Ercan See it on X
RT @dhh: Microservices is the software industry’s most successful confidence scam. It convinces small teams that they are “thinking big” while systematically destroying their ability to move at all. It flatters ambition by weaponizing insecurity: if you’re not running a constellation of services, are you even a real company? Never mind that this architecture was invented to cope with organizational dysfunction at planetary scale. Now it’s being prescribed to teams that still share a Slack channel and a lunch table.

Small teams run on shared context. That is their superpower. Everyone can reason end-to-end. Everyone can change anything. Microservices vaporize that advantage on contact. They replace shared understanding with distributed ignorance. No one owns the whole anymore. Everyone owns a shard. The system becomes something that merely happens to the team, rather than something the team actively understands. This isn’t sophistication. It’s abdication.

Then comes the operational farce. Each service demands its own pipeline, secrets, alerts, metrics, dashboards, permissions, backups, and rituals of appeasement. You don’t “deploy” anymore—you synchronize a fleet. One bug now requires a multi-service autopsy. A feature release becomes a coordination exercise across artificial borders you invented for no reason. You didn’t simplify your system. You shattered it and called the debris “architecture.”

Microservices also lock incompetence in amber. You are forced to define APIs before you understand your own business. Guesses become contracts. Bad ideas become permanent dependencies. Every early mistake metastasizes through the network. In a monolith, wrong thinking is corrected with a refactor. In microservices, wrong thinking becomes infrastructure. You don’t just regret it—you host it, version it, and monitor it.

The claim that monoliths don’t scale is one of the dumbest lies in modern engineering folklore. What doesn’t scale is chaos. What doesn’t scale is process cosplay. What doesn’t scale is pretending you’re Netflix while shipping a glorified CRUD app. Monoliths scale just fine when teams have discipline, tests, and restraint. But restraint isn’t fashionable, and boring doesn’t make conference talks.

Microservices for small teams is not a technical mistake—it is a philosophical failure. It announces, loudly, that the team does not trust itself to understand its own system. It replaces accountability with protocol and momentum with middleware. You don’t get “future proofing.” You get permanent drag. And by the time you finally earn the scale that might justify this circus, your speed, your clarity, and your product instincts will already be gone.
Dec 12, 2025
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RT @ealpaydin: "Scientists undertake basic research to generate new knowledge with no specific end goal in mind. Applied research is different in that it aims to find solutions to real-world problems." t.co/3zQAg87EUy
Oct 5, 2025
Gökhan Ercan See it on X
RT @rohanpaul_ai: "Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary classification.

If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures."

- OpenAI Paper
Sep 6, 2025
Gökhan Ercan See it on X
I really liked this OS analogy for LLMs. Strongly encourage watching the full speech by Karpathy. t.co/df0wB6JqnU
Aug 23, 2025